This book is the result of almost a decade of research in several related aspects of the linguistics of humor. As such, it is inevitably a composite and the result of a compromise between my desire to cover, on the one hand, as much as possible of the scholarship pertaining to humor research in linguistics and, on the other, my own research interests in the field.
The book combines a representative, if not exhaustive, survey of the literature in the linguistics of humor, with critical analyses of the more significant approaches and my own original ventures...

Linguistic Perception and Second Language Acquisition: Explaining the attainment of optimal phonological categorization

In Linguistic Perception and Second Language Acquisition, Paola Escudero provides a detailed description, explanation, and prediction of how optimal second language (L2) sound perception is acquired, and presents three empirical studies to test the model's theoretical principles. The author introduces the L2 Linguistic Perception (L2LP) model, a new formal and comprehensive proposal which integrates...

A Linguistic History of English Poetry

By bringing together the emphases and techniques of modern linguistics and literary criticism and applying them to a range of poetry, from Shakespeare to the present day, A Linguistic History of English Poetry argues that poetry is uniquely and intrinsically different from other linguistic discourses and non-linguistic sign systems. A variety of approaches, including New Criticism, Formalism, Structuralism and Poststructuralism, are used to show how poetic structure and poetic signification have changed since the sixteenth century

This insightful study proposes a unified theory of speech through which conflicting ideas about language might be understood. It is founded on a number of key points, such as the continuum of linguistic behaviour, extensive variation in language features, the importance of regional and social proximity to shared linguistic production, and differential frequency as a key factor in linguistic production both in regional and social groups and in text corpora.

Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language by Adele Goldberg

This book investigates the nature of generalization in language and examines how language is known by adults and acquired by children. It looks at how and why constructions are learned, the relation between their forms and functions, and how cross-linguistic and language-internal generalizations about them can be explained.